Charlotte Swasey

This is totally a thing people do, but it can be messy because 80% of the answer to "what's driving votes" is always "partisanship"

Nah I think that read is about right, just complicated because IRL you are dealing with both what voters like AND what will actually get covered

Very important to periodically step back from the niche factional fights and remember that you mostly agree and everyone is doing their best. In person meetings also very good for this!

Every time I get frustrated by chaos in the broad liberal coalition, Republicans go and do some shit like this and remind me that everyone i argue with is at least trying to make the world better, usually pretty nice, and not nearly this gross

Sorry for all the text, lol, I have survey thoughts and feelings

Imo the revealed preference is usually that you get more juice out of an issue that is surprising to be associated with a given partisanship, but it's super sensitive to the framing. Using messages ("a candidate who says blah") is better but even more sensitive

I'm currently doing zero modeled out results for Searchlight for transparency reasons , but it's common for folks to run this as a max diff or just toss it into a regression. Works okay!

Hm, like a "D who is focused on [issue]/R who is focused on [other issue]" thing? I've tried it in other work, it's interesting but I don't love it. Mostly because voters can interpret issues very differently when they have a partisanship attached

Oof. Yikes! Not good!

The #1 piece of advice that TransLink's CEO offers other North American transit agencies:

Provide frequent service

Checking In On Party Vibes A topic of particular interest at Searchlight is how Americans engage with the two major parties. We’re curious about what draws people to each party, and what they believe each party does best.

This goes beyond policy choices into vibes- what sort of life do Americans think each party is promoting? Mostly, not a very good one

Full writeup here from me @searchlightinst.bsky.social www.searchlightinstitute.org/research/che...

There's skepticism that *either* party wants you to have the markers of a good life, but it's worse for Democrats (even among Democratic voters)

People don't believe that Democrats want them to have a good life

Today: arguing that Sherrill might lose in NJ, and also why you probably shouldn't put too much faith in that guess (or any guess). Come stare at graphs, on the blog

open.substack.com/pub/cauldron...

This whole NY policy debate kind of blows my mind given that I recently disconnected and reconnected our gas range. It was a little annoying (like, a good wrench, some leverage, the right pipe tape) but not *hard*.

Great poll result from a very good @lakshya.splitticket.org piece today in The Argument. A lot of people think AI has been good for them but bad for others. www.theargumentmag.com/p/chatgpt-an...

Many such cases

Analytics and polling folks: I'll be at the Harvard political analytics conference this Friday if you want to get coffee or something

Oh totally. Voters love a villain. There's probably something clever you can do with framing new housing as breaking investor control but like oof it's messy!

I will commission the Searchlight graphic designers for a giant sign that says "do it you coward", it'll be multi purpose

I mean, Sirota is being a dick, but also I understand the abundance theory to be "it will work to lower prices and then voters will be happy"

Good policy and good politics are often not the same which is awkward

But I also read this as "you should probably not try to explain your specific plan to fix stuff and hope voters like the process" because they don't care (ie, abundance)

Imo it's both salience and positioning. Voters always want things to be magically fixed without tradeoffs, and the way they get information about issues is super messy. However, that info still does come from things that happen in the world

Mm, I think voters do have policy beliefs, even if they're not thought out or coherent. I.e. I think many voters want a reduction in illegal immigration, even if they don't like the policies that would actually get there

Yeah no worries, I do think we have points of agreement

Wait your argument here is Democrats have never actually tried to convince voters to trust them on the economy or immigration? That doesn't scan with the vast quantity of ads and persuasion material I've seen run

Okay, but *they do*. Voters do trust Republicans on these issues (not including climate). You can't just say it's not rational and dismiss it

The existence of negative media isn't a reason to handwave away real disagreements

I don't think this is right. Yes, Republicans constantly focus on the worst Democratic issues, but that happens the other way around as well, and it works best when Dems are out of step with voters. If your position is in step with voters, the other side has less to work with